"However, at various times after the system has gone to sleep it will wake back up without intervention for a few seconds and then shuts down. Sometimes this a few minutes after entering sleep mode, other times it occurred an hour or so later. The board requires a full power cycle to come back to life and does not always resume to Vista, instead we receive the error that Vista has been incurred an error after entering the OS."

Have you found a solution to this problem, seems like you are the only person, other than me, who is catching this issue. I have posted in numerous DG45ID forums and this exact issue is non-existent and haven't received any answers.
Reply

Anand, G965/G35/GM965 has 8 EUs(Execution Units), but each of the EUs contain 2 cores, meaning it has 16 cores. Each cores can also process 2 threads, meaning it has a maximum of 32 thread capability. From that, its not comparable to Nvidia, nor ATI so Intel have their own performance metric.

I second (thrid? fourth? fifth? 9th?) the call for the part 2 (what it's pretty obvious everyone is more interested in anyway, not this article).

I wonder if you coudl at least give us an ETA of not the article itself? You know, if it's this week, this month, or ??? Thta doesn't seem too much to ask, I'm surprised you don't give that from the start. Reply

Lots of talk of bringing a great roundup of chipsets...already for a few weeks now.

Where does anand start? at the least interesting and the most garbage chipset for several years now.

lets hope your global review is as good as people expect it to be.
you started off already a bit better then you did in recent gpu reviews, you actually took a cpu that was rather common to be used, although a e7200 or Q8200 would be a much better fit for this kind of boards.

Can they spell "hypocrite"? It really betrays your allegiance when you rant at Intel then go all wobbly and weak at the knees while mentioning AMD. AT are damned if they do, damned if they don't as far as reviewing either brand's offerings. They've already stated how good the 780G was. They've stated what bugs are in the G45. So what the heck is the problem?
Reply

The problem is, they promised a SB750 review 2 months ago. The problem is they promised a DFI LP JR. review 1 month ago. The problem is they go well out of there way to avoid any comparison of Intel's ITD, and AMD's IGP. So what if they obscure and bury a line inside an Intel article that gives credit to AMD hardware. They fail to give credit where credit is due, and it is glaringly obvious. And it's even more obvious when this article pops up suddently when Intel has a new driver. They were waiting on Intel's promises of a new driver that would improve performance, and show it's hardware in a better light. Doesn't matter if you crap in a plastic or paper bag, it's still a bag of shit though. I'll make a wager that none of the upcomming "promised" reviews will have any side by side comparisons of Intel's IDT, to any other IGP. Unless of course AT stalls long enough to allow Intle more time to produce yet another driver..... Reply

Impressive how many people just rant on about the review being inadequate when they obviously didn't even read the start of it! If they did that they'd know that reviews of AMD and nVidia boards are coming up and that all will be compared eventually!
I get the feeling that the people talking about "Intel fanbois" tend to have the same kind of appreciation of another brand...
Stating the obvious isn't being partial. It just so happens that AMD don't even come close to competing with Intel in the CPU department! Sure AMD might be cheaper, but there are cheap Intels out there as well. The whole platform tends to get a bit more expensive when you go with Intel but you get what you pay for. I'm perfectly happy with my G35+E2140. Does everything a computer is supposed to do but gaming. I'm not a gamer, so that is a non-issue for me.

Very tempted to go mini-ITX with 1,5TB HDD. Tiny box and lots of diskspace!

Found a nice case for it as well, Morex Venus 668. Not that I know anything about it really but it'll hold up to 3 HDDs and a full size ODD and probably house decent cooling for the CPU while still being tiny (~8"x9"x13"). Reply

Does this sight have an ounce of integrity left? I seriously doubt it. Nothing but Intel pandering left here. You "reviewers" have the gaul to do a review of this attempt at an IGP, yet fail to show any review of either an AMD IGP if it proves how inverior G45 is. Are you seriously implying that people are so stupid that they aren't capable of seeing through this BS? I remember something about a SB750 promise somewhere around 2 months ago that never materialized, then a 790gx promise that never materialized, then another 790gx roundup, that not only never materialized, but the DFI preview article seems to have actually vanished, then the AMD IGP part II looks to be delayed or something, probably vanished due to Intel's poor performance.

I am really really starting to wonder if AT was purchased by Intel. All evidence points to it. If not, then call a spade a spade and don't make promises you can't keep. I'm sure you think none of this matters because you're so popular that people will read no matter what you write here. I wouldn't be so confident if I were AT. Reply

I can tell you guys are really working on gaining that female readership. As everyone knows, women really go for that low-class, vulgar language.

Also, who would want to get rid of PS/2 ports? Whoever on your staff wants this, better have something more than they hate anything legacy. Where's the logic in adding two extra USB ports so you can remove the PS/2 ports? It's not like it's more flexible, really, because you pretty much always need the keyboard and mouse. When's the last time you were in the situation where you said "Oh, I won't be needing my mouse and keyboard today, and I'm so strapped for USB ports, it's a good thing I can use the ones I normally use for the keyboard and mouse for something else". Doubtful you've ever said it, and if you have, you have issues deeper than I am capable of dealing with.

It's not like the keyboard or mouse work better in the USB port, or that it's somehow superior in this configuration. In fact, the PS/2 ports were made specifically for this, and are perfectly adequate for it. Didn't you guys know that USB has more overhead than the PS/2 ports? I guess not. So, you worry about fractions of a percent going from motherboard to motherboard with the same chipset, but you prefer to use a USB mouse and keyboard? I just do not understand that. USB was a nice invention of Intel to suck up CPU power so you'd need a faster processor. It's a pity this has been forgotten.

Sure, let's the replace the efficient with the inefficient, so we can say we're done with the legacy ports and we can all feel like we've moved forward. Yes, that's real progress we want. Good grief. Reply

I really dislike the trend of recent reviews that go off on tangents about the state of the market, or particular vendor performance gripes and then the rest of the review doesn't even touch on relevant benchmarks or features to back up these rants. If you're going to complain about IGP performance from AMD or NVIDIA, you might want to back that up with at least ONE board being included in the comparison charts. Who cares if Intel G45 gets bad frame rates against itself (across the board to boot). Why not show how 3 IGP chipsets from the major vendors stack up against each other in something mainstream like Spore? If it's a G45 only review, how about you save the side comments for a true IGP roundup? Sorry, but if you have the time to post a "(p)review" that brings up competitive aspects with no benchmarks to balance out those comments, it's basically single-vendor propaganda - nothing in the conclusions deal with whether a IGP in the same price range from another vendor would fill the void that G45 clearly does not fill.

Since when does issues at the release date mean you can't post the review? "We struggled with G45 for much of the early weeks of its release, but the platform wasn't problem-free enough for a launch-day review." - Ummm, might want to include that as disclosure in all your other post-launch day reviews!?! Or do other vendors get brownie points for being problem-free when you can actually buy the product?

Unfortunately, the inconsistency across multiple reviews make it somewhat difficult to compare competing products from multiple vendors because the methodology varies between single chipset and competitive benchmarks, even when you can separate the irrelevant introductory comments and bias from the particular author from the rest of the review.

More authors obviously does not equal consistency or more relevant reviews.. Reply

Looking forward to your review of this board(if I understood you correctly), as I have been keeping an eye on this board for a while now. Perfect for an all around general use board(minus gaming of course), but would have been really REALLY nice if that 1x PCIe slot were a 16x PCIe with atleast 8x bandwidth. Hell I think i would settle with 4xPCIe speeds, just to have the ability to use an AMD/ATI 3650/3670 in this system. I think Jetway has a similar board with a 16x PCIe slot, slightly less features, at the cost of like $350 usd . . .

Now if someone reputable (meaning someone who can actually make a solid board from the START *cough*ABIT*cough*) using the Core 2 mobile CPU, SO-DIMMs, etc, AT A REASONABLE PRICE . . . I think I might be in power consumption heaven. Running my desktop 'beast' tends to drain the battery banks dry ; ) Reply

Why with a generation Die Shrink we only get 2 extra Shader instead of like 4 - 6? Where did all the extra available die space went?

With the New Radeon HD 4x series, people have consistent result they can get single digit CPU usage when viewing 1080P H.264 with a E7xxx Series CPU, or slightly more then 15% when using an old Celeron. This is 2 - 3 times better then G45!!!! Even 780G is a lot better then G45 as well. So why such a HUGE difference in performance of so called Hardware Accelerated Decoding? Reply

It is good to hear about new technology, initial issues and how they are worked out.
I hope the second part of this article is sooner than the follow up of "AMD's 790GX/SB750" expected chipset review. The AMD announcement was on August 6, 2008, with an expected review to follow.
On September 10th, Gary Wrote:
"An update, DFI decided to proceed forward with their uATX 790GX board. My retail kit arrived today and I will be testing it shortly. Also, based on your comments and others I will show a 4870x2 vs 4870 CF on this platform and compare it to 790FX. The roundup should be up late next week, G45 is up on Monday with 790GX/780G/GF8300/NF750a comparison results.

Sincerely,
Gary "

The recent article on Power Supplies was excellent.

The information is good, but some items appear not to be as important as others.

Glad to see the p45 is getting quality coverage, I was looking very closely at getting one for my HTPC. Theres a few things I'd like to see touched upon, hopefully in future articles.

First, how about a comparison of the post-processing capabilites and quality of the competing solutions? Supposedly intel's "clear video" is supposed to give us the same kind of solution for noise reduction, sharpening, and other postprocessing that nvidia and amd have been offering. Is it an automatic solution that you have no control over like amd, or is there an applet where you can choose how much effect is applied like nvidia?

Also, what about the new revision of intel turbo memory. I always see it mentioned in diagrams and previews, but have never seen it implemented on a board. Does it need onboard flash to function, or is there a PCIE, SATA or USB solution that can be added on to a g45 board in order to enable it? If onboard only, are there any actual boards that have implemented it? My understanding is that its little different from readyboost in vista, but the capability to actually choose whats in the cache is quite interesting to me. On my HTPC, I regularly use the same few apps, and I'd love to get those loading at solid state speeds.

Also, what software is required to enable the hardware acceleration of H.264 and the like? I'm not a fan of using desktop programs like PowerDVD on my HTPC - they often require me to pull out the keyboard which defeats the purpose of an HTPC imo. Can the acceleration be used in Windows Media Center, Mediaportal, or any other HTPC specific software? Reply

Hey, what happened to the preview of the DFI Lanparty P45 T2RS? Its between that one and the Asus P5Q-EM for my new SFF setup I wanna build in the next month.

I"ve been hearing lots about discrete video cards not working well or at all in the P5Q-EM. Did you guys run into issues with this or did you not even put in discrete video cards at all? Also, will the Asus support the higher Q9000 series Intel CPU's?

I"m trying to build a decent SFF gaming rig soon, and I wanna know what im getting myself into with either of these boards. Reply

I personally think you should have made price a bigger point, frankly you're comparing the G45 with the 780G, but the 780G boards average at US$80, while you can't get a G45 for less than US$100, plus a could go to newegg and get a 780G+Radeon 4670 for US$145, that's just 15 dollars more!!!

Besides when this site reviewed the 790GX there where some criticism about that chipset not actually targeting any specific market, well here is a hint, how about comparing the 790GX with the G45, both cost around 120 dollars.

Is the G45 a good Business board? Really? Well the way I see it a business pc that doesn't care about graphics performance or ou HTPC characteristics would be much better served with a US$66 780G, that's half the price of a average G45 motherboard, or even a US$49.99 740G.

Sorry if I was a little acid, but I'm just tired of IT sites comparing boards that aren't even in the same price range, the only reason I see for this is that Intel can't/doesn't compete in the same price range as the 780G/8200, but if that is the case then IT sites should compare the G45 with the 790GX.

P.S: Gaming in IGPs is not inexistent, ever heard of VALVe? The entire Orange Box runs on a 780G/8200(possibly the G45 also). But I do agree that with cards like the Radeon 4670 out there IGPs loose a lot of their(little?)value for gaming. Reply

AMD has an advantage in IGPs (less with G45) but a disadvantage in processors. If you care about price and don't care about power consumption/noise/processor performance you should go with AMD. Businesses will care about these things and are not so price sensitive. Reply

Is this correct that frequency response will not include 24 hertz. Is this a joke by Intel or by the author. I assume the author is trying to state 24 bit playback.

You should state that hardware MPEG-2/H.264/VC decoding is only supported in Windows.

I prefer AMD processors because they have IGP that works better than Intel's IGP offerings. Also IGP for AMD processors works in Linux while IGP from Intel does not. Intel fans are still stuck with Intel's IGP that are still pathetic. Reply

Thanks for the review review, a lot of useful information. Regarding the DG45FC board, voltage changes would be useful; but as you and SPCR have found, in combination with the E5200/E7200 processors it is a very power-efficient choice. You can build a low power but relatively high performance system without any tweaks (SPCR had 35W idle, 45W blu ray, 65W max load). Reply

I'm not sure why this board is measured/reviewed for its gaming ability (or lack of). A lot of HTPC peeps get these because they are quiet and can play DVD's without the noise /heat. Not many people really expect to play Oblivion on it. Reply

SPCR measured the power consumtion of the same mini-ITX G45 board and found it to consume 35W at idle with an E7200 CPU installed (which should consume a tiny bit more than a 5200, given it works at higher FSB speeds and has more cache).

Your figures showed something like 57W; one would say, hey, no big deal, we're talking about only 22W here. But if you take this as relative difference - it turns out to be 60%! SPCR used only one DIMM, but I doubt this can explain the discrepancy. The PSU was a 400W model, so I guess it has similar efficiency curve as the Corsair model you used.

Given the strange results of you power consumption measurements recently, I have reasons to doubt that something simply isn't right out there.
Reply

SPCR people will make more efficient choices. Efficient PSU, notebook hard drive, non-overclocked RAM. 57W is a good result for a mainstream review. Little things can add up to 22W, especially PSU efficiency. Reply

I am about ready to GO INSANE reading your site. You CAN'T POSSIBLY be making any MONEY off those things, they are too INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for anyone to ever THINK about watching one or clicking one.

Oh, and I LIKE PS/2 ports. What's wrong with PS/2 ? It works great, takes less cpu than USB (in my VERY informal mouse testing) and the headers take up very little space on the mobo. You also have the option to use the USB connections instead, if you want. Reply

Also, please keep up the good work and I appreciate you spending some time in the HTPC area. It seems to me there is a decided lack of good technical coverage in this arena. The kind of in-depth coverage that only your and a couple of other notable sites provide.
I would like to see some TV Tuner card reviews from your site comparing the technical details of the latest offerings from Hauppauge, ATI and any other popular ones. Toss in a review of a few PVR apps like GB-PVR, SageTV, MythTV and BeyondTV and (HTPC) life would be complete. Don't forge to address the difficulty of getting the channel listings when using a freebe like GB-PVR, or the ins and outs of getting scheduled recordings to actually WORK when the app uses the Windows Task Scheduler.

Seems as if an important candidate is MIA in your 3-part review of integrated chip-sets/uATX motherboards, the LONG-promised nVidia MCP7A chip-set for Intel processors with integrated 9400/9300 graphics. The only potential integrated-graphics competitor to the G45 in the Intel-processor world. When is the MCP7A due to be released? Most recent speculation (in DigiTimes, iirc) was the end of this month (September). In time to add a review of one or more uATX motherboards based on this chipset as Part 4 to this group of three reviews? Reply

Yep, it won't be too much longer and NV is quite excited about it but specifics I can't give out unfortunately.

*If* I were in NVIDIA's shoes I'd want to capitalize as best as possible on Intel's handling of G45. I'd make sure that the first products worked *perfectly* and availability was immediate and at competitive prices.

If NVIDIA blows this opportunity I'll be quite disappointed, especially given how much crap it has given Intel about Larrabee.

I was hoping there would be mention of the graphics problems when putting nvidia cards in these boards. I was very vocal about this over at the AVS forums. Did any one notice any mention of this in the article? Also will there be coverage of the new nvidia boards MCP7A? Reply

Our final article will feature the discrete cards like the 9600GT and HD 4670. In testing so far, I have not had the problems that have been reported. I do have some additional NV cards coming to test. We will have coverage on the GeForce 9400 series when it launches. ;) Reply

Your point might be valid if DRM worked, but can you point out a single mainstream home theater medium on which the DRM means anything to the pirates?

DRMed CDs? Ha. Those just pissed off consumers when they inevitable didn't play in some players and/or contained bad software. Often defeated with the frickin shift key.

DVD? People have tattoos of the DeCSS source code it's that damn short. Amusingly the longest lasting DRM scheme, with 2.5 years between the first DVD movie release and the release of DeCSS.

HD-DVD? 253 days, not even a full year after the format first shipped its AACS protection system was cracked. Under three weeks later the first copies start showing up on private trackers.

Blu-Ray (AACS)? The same AACS crack applied to it, and about two weeks after the first HD-DVD copies showed up Blu-Ray was right behind it. Launch to first pirated movie: 225 days.

Blu-Ray (BD+)? Slightly harder than AACS apparently, but titles did not ship with it until October 2007 so the cracking community got off to a late start. AnyDVD HD supported decrypting all BD+ titles roughly 5 months after the first titles shipped and copies again showed up soon after.

I'm less familiar with DVD-Audio and SACD, but my understanding is that there hasn't been a direct "crack" of their respective encryption but instead PC-based players and/or sound drivers are modified to just write the decoded bitstream to the hard drive. This works quite well for audio, as in most cases the compression (if any) applied on the disc is not wanted and the uncompressed PCM stream is exactly what the user desires. For obvious reasons that is not feasible with video.

Once these protections are broken, they do nothing to reduce piracy and only remain to prevent fair-use backups by technologically illiterate users and/or to annoy consumers with crap like these HDCP issues.

It doesn't even matter to the pirate crowd whether the cracks are public or private, as long as someone can do it that means the files will get out, and once they're out they're out. Reply